A summary of the most exciting recent news in advertising technology in the U.S., U.S.-Hispanic and Latin American markets. If you're trying to keep up, consider this your one-stop shop.

U.S./U.S. HISPANIC MARKET

DataXu, programmatic marketing software provider, is releasing a whitepaper which analyzes a year’s worth of data on ad fraud as the first instalment of its Programmatic Quality Report Series,The 2015 Advertising Fraud Report. This issue reports that brands lost $18.5 billion to fraud in 2015, and promises that things will get worse. Other statistics include the claim that fraud rates can reach 65% on exchanges, 17% on networks and 7% on publishers’ sites. The industry averages for fraud were reported between 6 and 30%.

NBC Universal and Vox Media have announced that they will sell digital ad inventory across their portfolio of brands together. This is the biggest collaboration between the two since NBCU invested in Vox last year. Their "Concert" digital inventory portfolio will combine premium inventory and audiences and concentrate on display ad inventory for the time being (although they will almost certainly incorporate digital video at some point). The collaboration will give advertisers more tools to reach targeted audiences.

The Atlantic and Univisionhave announced that CityLab Latino, a Spanish-language version of The Atlantic's CityLab, which focuses on urban and lifestyle news, has gone live. Juan Pablo Garnham, a veteran at El Diario, is managing the editorial efforts out of Miami.

In advance of the 2016 TV Upfronts, AOL today announced the launch of self-serve programmatic TV buying to give marketers a clearer view of valuable audience buying opportunities, and to better plan, purchase, and measure their TV ad investments. This self-serve module extends AOL’s ONE by AOL: TV managed module, which launched in 2014, and is part of the company’s open, unified programmatic platform ONE by AOL™, which launched in April 2015.

zvelo, a content categorization tool, announced the launch of zveloSHIELD™, a real-time, dual-decisioning ad fraud prevention and botnet detection system tool. It offers ways to combine pre-bid blocking of fraudulent IP addresses with zvelo's exploit and botnet detection capabilities.

Digital identity company Drawbridgeis partnering with Peer39® by Sizmek, a cookie-free targeting solution, to integrate Peer39’s contextual relevance data into the Drawbridge Cross-Device Platform. This way, advertisers, agencies and trading desks will be able to make media buys according to the contextual relevance of every web page, and decide exactly what ads they want their own ad to be placed next to.

Ghostly has announced that its Trackermap tool will be available to companies online a la carte instead of only through annual subscriptions. The tool improves the understanding of tracking tech online, displaying and mapping JavaScript tags associated with any single website.

eMarketerreleased a study that claims that mobile is driving the growth of programmatic advertising, accounting for more than two-thirds of all programmatic digital display-ad spending this year. Facebook, Alphabet‘s Google-owned YouTube, LinkedIn are important forces behind this trend. U.S. programmatic digital display-ad spending should reach $27.4 billion by 2017, an increase of 24%.

Proctor & Gambleis reportedly seeing three to five times greater ROI on ad spending through programmatic buying than it was through traditional environments.

Vasona Networks Inc, which creates platforms to help mobile-network operators improve user services, raised $14.6 million of Series C venture capital. The money will go towards Vasona’s projects with major network operators and drive R&D, the company said.

Virool, a video distribution platform for marketers, has raised $12 million in Series A funding to penetrate the global market, Latin America included. The funding came from Flint Capital, Menlo Ventures, Yahoo! Japan, and 500 Startups.

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LATAM MARKET

Nielsen Mexico has announced an agreement with MediaMath to integrate Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) with its TerminalOne programmatic media buying platform. DAR will provide comprehensive and real-time analysis of audiences on desktop and mobile for digital publishing campaigns - similar to Nielsen ratings for TV.

eMarketer's latest stats also reveal that digital ads represented less than 20% of Mexico's total advertising spending, but that this number should rise to a third by 2020. Mobile is on the rise in Mexico as well, as $1 out of $10 that goes to advertising spending in 2016 and $1 in every $4 by 2020 will go to the mobile screen. In Brazil, the Olympics will boost advertising, and mobile is also growing. It currently accounts for 6% of ad spending, but that should rise to 19.1% by 2020. In Argentina, mobile will account for 4% of spending this year, a number that will reach 17.2% by 2020.

iFood, the largest online food delivery platform in Latin America, today announces the acquisition of SpoonRocket technology. This move is the fifteenth acquisition in two years for iFood, and will continue to bolster the company’s unchallenged dominance of the on-demand economy in Brazil. The company plans to use SpoonRocket’s robust logistics technology to optimize delivery time, enhance the restaurant-to-consumer experience, and continue its rapid expansion in LatAm and other emerging economies.

Global media network Caratreleased growth forecasts for ad spending in 2017, and Latin American advertising markets are predicted to stay strong and achieve up to 10.5 % YOY growth.

H.I.G. Capital, a leading global private equity investment firm with $19 billion of equity capital under management and investor in Batanga Media, announced the closing of H.I.G. Brazil & Latin America Partners at $740 million, exceeding its $600 million target. The Fund will continue H.I.G.’s successful investment strategy of focusing on private equity, buyout and growth-oriented investments in lower middle-market companies in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil.

Gretchen Gardner @gardnergretchen

Gretchen is a communications specialist and owner of GMG Strategic Communications. She currently lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she works with Argentine and international ventures on shaping their content, branding and marketing strategies to position them for success in global markets. She is also a lover of all things information and has worked consistently in journalism since college, most recently as a writer at Portada and as the deputy editor of The Bubble, the first informal, English-language news portal in Buenos Aires. She hails from Washington, D.C. and has a bachelor's degree in history and Hispanic studies from Hamilton College as well as a master's in international relations from the Argentine university Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

Gretchen is a communications specialist and owner of GMG Strategic Communications. She currently lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she works with Argentine and international ventures on shaping their content, branding and marketing strategies to position them for success in global markets. She is also a lover of all things information and has worked consistently in journalism since college, most recently as a writer at Portada and as the deputy editor of The Bubble, the first informal, English-language news portal in Buenos Aires. She hails from Washington, D.C. and has a bachelor's degree in history and Hispanic studies from Hamilton College as well as a master's in international relations from the Argentine university Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

Each fall, the USHCC hosts the country’s largest gathering of Hispanic business leaders: The USHCC National Convention. The Convention is held every year in a city that embodies the American entrepreneurial spirit and supports a thriving small business community.

With more than 2 billion active users worldwide, and 80 million monthly active users in Mexico alone, the social media giant is boosting revenue at a faster pace than expected. An important part of Facebook's efforts and investments are going into the creation of a major video advertising platform.